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Rotting Apples and Bathtub Genius: A Masterclass in Creative Procrastination
I wandered into this conversation with expecting us to just talk about creative routines, and instead found myself in something closer to group therapy for procrastinators. Which, frankly, is exactly where I belong.
Mason—author of the Daily Rituals books that have probably launched a thousand failed morning routines—joined me to discuss the delicate art of tricking your brain into doing the thing you claim you want to do. It's the kind of conversation that makes you simultaneously inspired and deeply aware of your own creative failures.
I began sheepishly introducing myself as someone who'd lost actual time reading his work. Not the romantic "oh, I couldn't put it down" kind of time loss, but the genuinely concerning kind where you look up and three hours have vanished and you're taking notes in the margins like you're cramming for finals.
The book started, naturally enough, as procrastination. Mason was avoiding a writing assignment and instead researching other people's writing processes—the creative equivalent of cleaning your entire apartment to avoid doing your taxes. "I kind of thought, boy, somebody should just collect all these stories in one place," he said, "and at that moment, there really wasn't that place yet."
What emerged from that beautiful act of avoidance was a collection of stories revealing creative work's magnificent ordinariness. "In a way, there's no secret," Mason said. "You have to kind of carve out the time and show up for it, usually on a daily basis." Most writers, he noted, can't really concentrate for more than three or four hours a day. Painters get eight hours in the studio, but writers? We're apparently delicate flowers who wilt after a proper morning's work.
The real pattern that emerges—across centuries and disciplines—is almost embarrassingly simple: wake up, have coffee, work for a few hours, take a walk. "The all-important daily walk," Mason called it, "that is such a theme throughout the book, throughout all time periods and disciplines. That's where people really got their ideas or really worked things out, is when they stepped away from their desks and got moving."
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We talked about Maya Angelou's hotel room setup: a crappy motel with nothing but a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of playing cards, and a bottle of sherry. It's the pre-digital equivalent of aeroplane mode—complete sensory deprivation except for the essentials. I found myself nostalgic for an era when your biggest distraction was a game of solitaire instead of the infinite scroll of despair we call the internet.
Mason's newsletter, "
," (the old logo of which I designed) takes its name from a Kafka quote about wriggling through life with small adjustments when a straightforward path isn't possible. "One must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres," he quoted, "and I just love that image of like kind of trying to find your path and making whatever like small adjustments you can."
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